Hi all, or ni hao as they say in this part of the world!

We arrived in Shanghai, after a long flight from Delhi. Even though we were exhausted, we decided to take a public bus rather than a taxi into the city from the airport, to save some money (we are backpackers after all). The girl at the tourist information booth, was none too friendly when we asked for directions, she just wrote something in Chinese on a piece of paper and pointed us to the door. So we set off with our piece of paper to find the correct bus. Every bus driver pointed us to the next, which should have served as a warning to us, but no, we kept going.

Eventually we found the bus, but after driving through the city for about an hour, the driver dumped us on a traffic island. We were then set upon by about 20 hawkers screaming in Chinese and pointing towards taxis, waving hotel brochures. We struggled through these, got off the traffic island and jumped in the first taxi that would stop. Thinking we were all sorted, we breathed a sigh of relief, however, this guy didn't speak or read any English. After ten minutes of trying to communicate, Martin decided to use the phrase book in the back of the Lonely Planet. Suprisingly, this did not get us any further, and the taxi man abandoned us within ten minutes at the train station. We walked around for a while and eventally found a taxi man who could take us to our hotel. So we arrived at our hotel absolutely exhausted, 5 hours late, but it was all worth it as we saved the princely sum of 1 euro!

Aside from this adverture everything else about Beijing was super. We visited lots of sights such as the Summer Palace, which are these gardens containing lots of ancient temples and palaces where Emperors used to spend their summers. They all had names like Gardens of Heavenly Pleasures or Temple of Divine Goodness. They were beautiful, and we sat in a tea house drinking peach tea overlooking the lakes for ages.

Summer Palace

The language is a problem here, and for this reason we have a guide for the rest of our Chinese travels. Or should I say we had a guide, on day one he took us to the Great Wall, gave us an hour, then herded us through some tombs for about 30 minutes. The next day he told us he was sick and we had to go on to Shanghai without him - and that we would have a new guide here in Shanghai. We have a new guide now, who looks about 14 years old, but he doesn't seem to know where anything is. I asked him to show us where we were on a map the other day, and he had to go and make a phone call! We hope he gets better or we may have to buy him a copy of the Lonely Planet so that he can find his way home when the tour is finished.

But by far the best thing about China has been the food. We have discovered two things - Chinese food markets and dumplings. Dumplings are real meat mixed with various vegetables boiled or fried in pastry and topped off with some soysauce or chilli! Absolutely beautiful. They are about the size of Campbell's meatballs and you can buy 24 fresh on the streets for about 1 euro. I am thinking of opening up some dumpling stores in Ireland when I get back as they would be excellent for those long trips home from the pub. This could be the death knell for the burger and chip or kebabs. They are just so nineties. The new millenium has arrived and it will be known in the history books as the Great Dumpling Dynasty era.

As for the food markets, madness, madness, madness. Hundreds of little street stalls crammed into tight little dimly lit alleyways with thousands of insane Chinese screaming at you to try their wares. A dream land for anyone who likes food.

In Beijing we walked to one such street market where you could basically get anything you wanted! There was kebabs of lamb, chicken, shrimp, beef, kidney, liver and tofu. Then there was the more exotic such as live skewered scorpions (the skewer was through the sting). They also had massive starfish which you could have deep fat fried. It really is what I imagined a Chinese food market to be like. Needless to say I tried lamb and chicken kebabs (I think) and had a plate of fried noodles. Yes, I am now eating with chopsticks! However I am fairly useless at it but just get stuck in. On a positive note it makes the meal last longer which isn't a bad thing!

Roisin in Tiananmen Square

In Shanghai we discovered what is locally called a food mall. Sounds tacky but the food is excellent. It's about the same size as a Dunnes store but is basically just a massive restaurant. Think any kind of Chinese food and meat and vegetable, then multiply what you are thinking about by 100. The food is prepared as you order it, so it is fresh.

We found a similar restaurant in Beijing a few days earlier. Nobody spoke a word of English and we wanted some duck. I thought I spotted some duck and was trying to verify if I was correct. There was lots of pointing and poking at the meat but we just weren't sure (you know how everything looks like chicken). Eventually a manager came who spoke some English. I told him I wanted DUCK! He didn't understand, we conversed for a while and then he went, you want DOG. I said no and started quacking to imitate a duck, he replied by barking like a dog! He then laughed at me. The dish was chicken in fact! A whole bloody wok full and I could only eat a third of it. The chef who cooked it then laughed his balls off as I tried to tuck into this meal with my trusty chopsticks. Mission Impossible!

Bloody great big wide wall

Shanghai is very modern and the only thing that was being built here was bucket loads of bloody big skyscrapers, personally I think that China only wants to build cities bigger than America. Shanghai from our experience was also the city which boasted the worst air pollution in China. There was just a fog that covered everything and never cleared away. I would hate to think of the damage that living in a Chinese city would do to you for any length of time. In Shanghai, visibility was down to 150 metres at street level due to smog. The problem is the same all over the country and is predicted only to get worse. China proudly boasts 9 out of the ten most polluted cities in the world. I am glad the winds don't blow from China to Ireland.

The food in Shanghai was excellent and we had some more cracking meals! I asked our guide to order a local speciality in one restaurant, not knowing what it was. Out came a big bowl with a full chicken, head and all! The bowl was also full of some clear liquid and an eel! It was also in Shanghai that we spotted the Chinese answer to nappies. The answer is that the babies here don't wear any! You will see a little toddler walking along and the back of their trousers is just a split with nothing underneath which allows them quick access to go to the toilet.

We also spotted some excellent Chinglish. For those who don't know, Chinglish refers to the English translations for Chinese signs that are posted in a variety of places. They range from information signs to menus.

Examples in Shanghai included:

Menu (name of ice cream)
"Penguin lays eggs on side of mountain". Your guess is as good as mine but Roisin in her curiosity ordered it. It was just coloured ice with something that resembled eggs in the form of cherries.

Train
I really liked this one. The sign read: "PLEASE DON'T THROW YOURSELF OUT THE WINDOW"

I now have an inherent fear about cappuccino makers and will find it difficult to order one when I return to the western world. People in China love to spit. Not only do they spit on the street, at restaurant tables, on the train, etc but they really try their hardest to make sure that they clear their entire chest cavity of all mucus to do so. This usually involves a noise, which is exactly the same as a cappuccino maker frothing milk for about twelve seconds, prior to the launching of the projectile. As at any launch site you have to be very careful to stand upwind of the launch in the event of misdirection. This practice is widespread and those involved range from the youngest children to the oldest adults - even sweet little old ladies. Starbucks will never be the same again! The other speciality is clearing out the nose like footballers during a match. I will leave this to your vivid imaginations but will just say that dog droppings are not the only thing that you take steps to avoid on the ground.

From Shanghai we visited Nanjing and Yichang, and then on to our Three Gorges Dam boat trip! The boat and crew used for our three day cruise on the Yangtze river to see the Three Gorges were fairly crap and entertainment did not exist except for Chinese karaoke, even Roisin could not be moved to join in. This was not really as advertised. I have to admit that I did find it funny that a Chinese person would be sitting on their own in the room for karaoke. The room was big enough for a few hundred people. However these poor individuals would be there on their own, some singing all fecking day, and they were awful. When I first came on board I thought that it was a torture and reeducation centre on board the ship and that we were all in line for extra study sessions.

Added to this, the crew took a dislike to our tour group. I don't think they appreciated the fact that we drank them out of beer. In all honesty there were about thirty bottles of beer on the boat which for a three day cruise was not much considering there were a few hundred people on board. We only drank twenty. At times I actually thought it was a religious retreat but it was then that I recalled that we were in China.

Three Gorges (check out the boat for scale)

The scenery all along the Three Gorges journey was absolutely fantastic. We also visited the little Three Gorges which were absolutely stunning. We took a smaller old style Chinese wooden boat through the beautiful dark blue waters flanked on either side by massive huge cliffs.

During the trip we saw the infamous Three Gorges dam at night and it is absolutely monstrous. We had to go up via five locks and a total of a hundred and ten metres just to reach the level of water on the other side of the dam. It is going to be a hell of an environmental disaster. We visited many towns that were going to be flooded. They are working like mad all along the river to build new houses and bridges above the proposed water line.

After the cruise, we moved on to Xian, which is another big city in the south of China. It was bloody hot here with no breeze and we were lucky enough to hit it in the middle of a heat wave. Temperatures were usually above 40C after midday to about 8pm when it would cool down to about 35C. Lucky us eh? I have to say at times I was praying for some really cold Irish weather to descend upon us! Xian was a lot less polluted and you could see patches of blue sky through the smog which was a relief!

One of my main memories of Xian is the hotel that we stayed in. The hotel itself had a beautiful reception. But as in most Chinese hotels this is a con. When we got to the rooms I discovered possibly the only room in the world that had been cleaned less than my bedroom in Dublin. It was so filthy that I am sure students would not live there!

Anyhow it got better as during the night at all hours the phone in the room constantly rang, everytime I lifted the receiver the woman would start to speak in Mandarin. The next day I mentioned this and everybody else had encountered the same issue. However in the rooms where a female had answered the phone the woman never spoke and the calling stopped. With this information I recalled something that I had read in the Lonely Planet where it stated that calls from hookers were common in rooms that contained westerners. From then on I had the perfect excuse to let Roisin answer the phone! In truth we had no option but to unplug the lead from the wall as the buggers were so persistent.

During our visit to Xian we took in the Terracotta Warriors. This was very impressive and a trip that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Close look at the Warriors

Our next stop after this was a place called Yangshou which is further south again. This was a really cool place and somewhere that I could have stayed for a few weeks. There were lots of things to do such as rafting, abseiling, canoeing, trekking, mountain biking etc. The scenery here was absolutely stunning with limestone karst rocks littering the entire area. As well as all this, there was the small matter of there being lots of pubs which sold the local beer in a 640ml bottle for 70 cents, a bonus which I for one appreciated.

Whilst here we took a mountain bike ride on a very hot day. As part of the trip we got to visit and dip in a beautiful crystal clear lake. We also had to stick our heads under the waterfall at the end of the lake to cool down. It was almost as refreshing as a bulmers with ice on a hot summer's day!

Scenes from mountain bike ride in Yangshou

Also in Yangshou we had the opportunity to sample more dumplings as market research for our previously mentioned dumpling store. We told the owner of a hotel we were staying in about our plans. We must have been convincing after four beers because he started to ask us how much was a pound of pork? How much was rent? How much would people pay etc. These questions threw us a bit and I had the sudden realisation that making dumplings may not be the money spinner that we first thought! Nevertheless at the owner's insistence we learned how to make dumplings the next day in his restaurant. We now know all the insider secrets and secret ingredients required to make the perfect dumpling.

Throughout the entire trip one thing that was consistent all over China was the Japanese tourists. The best way I can describe them is that they suddenly appear from nowhere like a regiment of troops or army ants. Each tour party is clearly distinguishable from the next tour party by their identical baseball caps. Not only can these guys go through more memory cards and film than anyone else but they have another talent in that they can devour a tourist site at a similar speed to that at which a cloud of locusts could devour a crop.

Finally we headed for Hong Kong. We arrived in Hong Kong via hydrofoil from mainland China after a long night on a sleeper train, this was the end of our organised tour and we were now on our own again. The trip on the hydrofoil was fairly boring as there was a lot of fog and we couldn't see much and I just read my Lonely Planet. At first glance Hong Kong looked mad and it was. Hong Kong is literally packed to bursting point. I have never seen a place with so many neon signs. When you leave your room at night, you would swear that you were walking into a midday sun, it was so bright.

We liked it but it was the most uncomfortable place weather wise we have been to in our entire trip. It is by no means the hottest but all the concrete and air conditioners combined with the humidity really wear you down. It never cools down here; the concrete and tarmac absorb the heat and then release it at night. It was 36C one of the days (it felt much hotter) with 100% humidity. I have never sweated so much in all my life. The best way to describe Hong Kong is as a sauna and I have never been in a sauna for six days before.

During our stay we embarked on a day trip to Macau which is a former Portuguese colony, this turned out to be a fairly disappointing trip and I would only recommend it to buffs who are interested in the colonial history of Portugal and the Catholic church in Macau. What was entertaining was all the people throwing up in what I can only describe as calm seas. We have never seen so many sick bags filled up so quickly. They all must have had massive breakfasts!

This travelogue was originally published here